The J Street ad that you published [April 30, containing an open letter to Nobel Prize Winner Elie Wiesel from Yossi Sarid, a former Israel minister of education and of the environment], is highly offensive, and lacking in sophistication.
The disrespectful letter claims that Wiesel’s evoking the Jews’ biblical deed to Jerusalem imbues the current conflict with messianic hues. Query: what is messianic about a real estate deed or chain of title or ownership or archaeological evidence linking the Jews to Jerusalem so deeply while Jerusalem was not even mentioned directly in the Koran?
The avowedly leftist letter writer may not care very much, if at all, about any of the 613 commandments in the Bible, but at least he claims, in his dramatic conclusion, that he is in favor of fulfilling God’s command to Abraham to “Arise, walk through the land in the length of it and in the breadth of it.” When the Temple Mount and east Jerusalem were in Arab hands, from 1948 to 1967, no Jew was permitted into east Jerusalem, much less through the length or breadth of a single dunam of it.
Wiesel did not have to resort to messianic arguments; the historical and archaeological evidence is overwhelming. But the claim that Wiesel had to resort to messianic arguments is as phony as the Arabs’ claims to Jerusalem.
Kew Gardens, Queens
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